Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer prize-winning author, broadcaster and master chronicler of American life in the 20th century, died last night. He was 96.

Celebrated for his streetwise portrayals of the American working class, Terkel was best known for letting the common people he called "the uncelebrated" tell their stories in books like Working and The Good War.

To generations of radio listeners he was also the voice of The Studs Terkel Show, which ran for 43 years and was widely syndicated across the US.

The cause of death was not announced, but in recent years Terkel had been beset by various ailments and his health took a turn for the worse two weeks ago when he suffered a fall in his home. At his bedside was a copy of his latest book, PS: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, scheduled for release this month.

Born Louis Terkel, he was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to personify his adopted town.

He won the Pulitzer prize in 1985 for his nonfiction work The Good War: an Oral History of World War II, one of a dozen best-selling books he wrote.

His first work was a little known book, Giants of Jazz, published in 1957, but he earned his fame with Division Street: America, compiled from interviews with Chicagoans from all walks of life. Using their own words, it told the stories, of businessmen, prostitutes and ordinary working people.

It was a theme that Terkel would explore again and again, in Hard Times, his 1970 Depression era memoir; in Working, his saga of ordinary lives in 1974; and in American Dreams: Lost and Found in 1980.

In 1986 he published Chicago, regarded by many as a distillation of much of what he had come to feel for a city that he was closely identified with. Capturing the voices of the city, he quoted ordinary men and women from social activists to police sergeants. His own voice was also present in the book's anecdotes and reminiscences about his family and growing up. Last year he marked his 95th birthday with the publication of The Studs Terkel Reader, My American Century.

"If I did one thing I'm proud of, it's to make people feel that together, they count," he said last year.

In an interview with the Guardian this January, Terkel demonstrated his appetite for provocation was undiminished, wondering aloud of Tony Blair: "Why was he such a house-boy for Bush?"

Writing in his last book, Touch and Go: a Memoir, he told how he had "after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us."

"I took a vacation once - it involved a beach - and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life."

Born in 1912 to Russian Jewish parents, he got the nickname Studs as a young man from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T Farrell's trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's south side.

After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1932, where he studied philosophy and law, early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and radio interview shows. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, Studs' Place, a programme of improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar owned by Studs. Some viewers thought it was a real place, and would search for it in Chicago.

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years until her death in 1999.

Their son, Dan Terkel, said in a statement last night: "My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life." Describing his father's death as "peaceful, no agony" he added: "This is what he wanted."

Speaking to a reporter last year, Terkel said "My epitaph? My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat.'"

In his own words

"We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we're not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world."

"We can't make any choices unless we connect the past with the present. The thing that horrifies me is the forgetfulness."

"I'm known around the block as a writer and broadcaster, but also as that old guy who talks to himself."

"We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes."